Tag: one percent

The wealthy and their GOP apologists talk about poor people as the takers. They have it completely backward

Source: Rich people are the f**king worst: The 1 percent’s vile new war on us all – Salon.com

This article is a fairly direct takedown of the entitlement culture shared by many wealthy people. I disagree with its conclusion though:

Wealth, it’s worth noting, isn’t the enemy. The problem is the attitude of the wealthy, the contempt, the indifference, and the lack of anything resembling civic virtue.

No, that’s not the problem. Here’s the dirty little secret about money and wealth: it is a social construct. We have a socially trained impulse to recognize hierarchy and class. We have a socially trained impulse to defer to wealthy people.

The same way racism rests on the social construct of white superiority, the problem of class entitlement rests on the social construct of wealth. Stop recognizing wealth and watch the corresponding privilege vanish.